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'The irony': Same skills that helped Davenport get chancellor job were listed as poor upon her firing

How was Beverly Davenport chosen as UT's chancellor? We talk to those involved in the search and why, exactly, she was hired as UT's first female chancellor, only to be fired from the post a little more than a year later.

New University of Tennessee Chancellor Beverly Davenport looks out at the crowd during a press conference in Thompson-Boling Arena on Thursday, March 2, 2017.(Photo: CAITIE MCMEKIN/NEWS SENTINEL)Buy Photo

Beverly Davenport’s communication skills made her a standout in the trio of accomplished finalists vying for the University of Tennessee Knoxville’s chief post.

At least that’s what Bonnie Ownley remembers.

“That is the irony of it all,” said Ownley, a professor of plant pathology at UT Knoxville who served on the chancellor search committee as a representative of the university’s Faculty Senate.

The very skills that Ownley applauded in Davenport upon her hiring tie into the skills, or lack thereof, that expedited her firing.

While “her ability to communicate openly in describing her past experiences and what her vision was” for the institution impressed Ownley, by the end of her campus reign University of Tennessee System President Joe DiPietro branded as "very poor" her communication skills in one-on-one, small group and business transactions.

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Joe DiPietro, president of the University of Tennessee during a news conference on Monday, May 7, 2018.(Photo: Saul Young/News Sentinel)

In what’s become widely viewed as a scathing termination letter DiPietro issued Davenport, he also noted, “You have failed to communicate to the campus a defined strategic vision of where you want to take the institution and a plan for its implementation.”

“During a comprehensive national search, Dr. Davenport rose to the top of the candidate pool because of her extensive experience and qualifications,” he said in a November 2016 announcement of her appointment. “She will be an excellent fit as the next leader of UT Knoxville.”

He also termed her “a proven higher education leader with a tremendous record of accomplishments across a wide array of initiatives that show her ability to achieve great things.”

DiPietro declined a request for an interview with USA TODAY NETWORK-Tennessee about what propelled Davenport above the other two finalists in the running for the role of chancellor at the flagship school, instead standing by his initial words of praise for her, and how, exactly, she was vetted.

A standard, but extensive search

Davenport, who came from the University of Cincinnati where she had led the school as interim president, trumped 61 other applicants to become the first female head of UT-Knoxville at age 62.

She also brought higher education experience from Purdue University, where she filled the position of vice provost for faculty affairs, and from the University of Kansas, having served as dean of social sciences.

She was fired a little more than a year into the top job at UT-Knoxville, allowed to stay on as a professor in the College of Communication & Information – an offer that Ownley also pointed out as ironic given the criticisms directed at her.

The gamut of candidates included other interim college presidents and established presidents, provosts and executive-level administrators.

“This is a highly qualified pool of individuals who were competing for that position and her qualifications put her up there among the very top candidates,” Ownley said.

Compiling a set of viable candidates and vetting them entailed an exhaustive, months-long process steered largely by a search committee, whose members first met in July 2016. Davenport was officially named chancellor in November that year, succeeding Jimmy Cheek, who had stepped down to pivot into teaching higher education leadership as a faculty member.

The search committee, chaired by Steve Mangum, dean and professor of the UT Knoxville Haslam College of Business, brought together a spectrum of representatives from the university community – including professors, a student leader, then-UT Trustee Charlie Anderson, past-UT Trustee Vice Chairman Brian Ferguson, then-UT Alumni Board Past President Alan Wilson, then-UT Martin interim chancellor Bob Smith and other campus administrators.

The 13-person committee worked in tandem with Parker Executive Search, an executive search firm out of Atlanta specializing in higher education among other industries. The firm was paid $75,000 plus $7,500 in expenses.

The process largely consisted of two phases, recruitment and selection, Mangum said.

During recruitment, “you’re trying to cast the net as widely as you can,” he said, noting what follows are efforts to narrow the search, though it’s important to not narrow that search too quickly.

To attract a breadth of applicants, the search committee tapped its own network, shared information about the job with colleagues across the university and asked them to help spread the word, and relied on Parker Executive Search to assist in drawing talent for consideration.

The firm was then tasked with following up with any chancellor prospects who surfaced and encouraging them to submit their applications.

Often, Mangum said, most applications will arrive close to the deadline with confidentiality issues often conflicting those turning them in.

Leaders of schools eyeing job opportunities at other public colleges and universities can be wary that “confidentiality might be compromised,” Mangum said, with the potential for their employer to find out they’re interested in an outside position before they even know if they’re a serious contender for that position.

It’s something of “a cat-and-mouse” process, he said.

It’s also a barrier for attracting some of the best of the best, said Ann Baker Furrow, the first woman who served on UT’s Board of Trustees and a golfer who became the first woman to play a men’s varsity sport at the institution. She's not on the board now.

New law on hiring confidentiality

The Sunshine Law “really does narrow the process,” Furrow said, insisting policy change is due so that chancellor candidates don’t face such high stakes after being placed on such a public platform.

Legislation passed this year did change the confidentiality of the hiring process for college, university and university system presidents, but not for chancellors, according to Deborah Fisher, executive director of the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government.

The legislation mandates search committees name no more than three presidential finalists, rather than no fewer than three, meaning they could name only one or two finalists, Fisher said.

Any finalist must be made public. The law will be in place for three years before it is automatically repealed, Fisher said, and a report will be produced examining how the law has worked.

But when it comes to chancellors, she said, a minimum of three finalists must still be named and put forth into the public spotlight.

Three chancellor finalists

Once the search committee whittled down the initial body of applications and determined who to move forward with for the first level of interviews – usually 12 to 15 people – they scheduled “airport interviews,” Mangum said, noting a school generally flies applicants into an airport where the interviews are conducted.

From there, the search committee decides which chancellor hopefuls to pursue more seriously, inviting them to campus typically as finalists.

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An open forum at the University of Tennessee Law School with Pamela Whitten on Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2016. Whitten is the first candidate to visit the campus in the search for the next chancellor to lead UTK.(Photo: MICHAEL PATRICK/NEWS SENTINEL)

“It’s a fairly fluid process and there’s no way to predict in advance just how many finalists you’re going to have,” Mangum said, noting in some cases a finalist will commit to another job in the midst of a university search process.

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Pamela Whitten, the first candidate for the chancellor position at UTK, speaking during an open forum at the Law School Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2016.
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UT-Knoxville originally extended a campus invite to four individuals, one of whom did not end up coming to campus, though Mangum was not certain why.

Along with Davenport, who visited campus in early November 2016, University of Georgia Provost Pamela Whitten and then-provost and executive vice chancellor for the State University of New York Alexander Cartwright – now chancellor of the University of Missouri – stepped foot onto campus to share their visions for the university.

University leadership first denied that the three were finalists, even though they were the only candidates slated to come to UT Knoxville for campus-wide interviews. The News Sentinel challenged that assertion, submitting a public records request for the names and resumes of all candidates at the end of October 2016.

The university’s move to reverse its decision and frame the three as finalists fell on the seven-day deadline it had to respond to the News Sentinel.

"Given the strength of the three on-campus interview candidates and the fact that no new applications have been received in the last few weeks, I felt we needed to adjust our approach to move the search process along as efficiently as possible by the search committee naming them finalists," DiPietro had said in a statement to the News Sentinel. "We will continue to encourage and receive feedback from faculty, staff, students and external stakeholders about all finalists through the remainder of the search process."

Less than two weeks after Davenport’s first interview on campus, she returned for a second cluster of interviews before she was hired at a base salary of $585,000 annually plus additional compensation – the highest of any UT leader.

The search committee’s chief responsibility in the final stages of the vetting process centered on answering two questions for each finalist – whether they were acceptable and what their strengths and weaknesses encompassed – and passing that information along to UT System President DiPietro.

Alexander Cartwright, provost of the State University of New York and candidate to be chancellor of University of Tennessee-Knoxville(Photo: Submitted)

"Our job was done as a search committee when we provided to him those statements of strengths and weaknesses,” Mangum said.

Along with Mangum, Ownley and Heather Hirschfeld, a professor of English and former director of the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies who served on the search committee, expressed confidence in how extensive of a search the university conducted.

'Nothing that could have been done better'

“There’s absolutely nothing that could have been done better,” Ownley said.

“The process was very thorough,” Hirschfeld said, emphasizing that the university invited input from the community along the way.

Though, questions about the practices that the executive search firm UT-Knoxville partnered with surfaced in 2015 after the company helped with two controversial hires, as reported by Inside Higher Ed. Among them was the appointment of University of Iowa President Bruce Harreld, who disclosed that part of his resume was inaccurate.

The university has contracted with the company in past searches and has “a good track record with the university,” Mangum said would be his assumption.

Mangum had previously interacted with Parker Executive Search as a candidate when being considered to take over as business dean, but he was not involved in bringing the company on board for the chancellor search and was not aware of any of the controversies tied to the company.

He said he was not sure whether the university had known about the hiring scandals related to the company.

Parker Executive Search declined to comment on its role in UT Knoxville’s chancellor search, insisting the firm has a policy to not speak with media.

Why did Davenport stand out?

When asked what elevated Davenport above Whitten and Cartwright, the chair of the search committee said it wouldn’t be appropriate for him to expand on her strengths relative to the other contenders.

“The decision as to why an offer was extended to her above other candidates…that’s not anything I have knowledge of,” Mangum said.

However, he did note that the committee did not have any reason to doubt the capabilities of any of the three.

“There was certainly nothing in the feedback that we received as part of this process that caused us any concerns about the qualifications and capabilities of any of the individuals that we recommended for further consideration by the president,” Mangum said. “All three were very strong candidates and checked out, if you will, in terms of their prior employment and accomplishments at other universities.”

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University of Tennessee students gather at The Rock in a rally of support for Beverly Davenport on Wednesday, May 2, 2018. (Photo: Saul Young/News Sentinel)

When Davenport visited campus to talk to students and faculty, she devoted part of a campus forum to drawing parallels between her goals and those of her audience and underlining her ambition to be at a place that shared her values and is “aspirational.”

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UT Chancellor Beverly Davenport adds paint to her hand before leaving her hand print on The Rock during a gathering on Friday, February 9, 2018, to speak out against recent racist messages painted on The Rock. (Photo: Brianna Paciorka/News Sentinel )

It was clear that the prospective chancellor knew how important the institution’s established goals were and was keen on seeing them through, Hirschfeld said.

“I think she displayed during that time a real grasp of UT’s aspirations,” Hirschfeld said, explaining she caught on quickly to Vol vision and was able to speak to the interests of various stakeholders in the university.

“She brought a tremendous amount of energy and savvy to what had been UT’s clearly articulated long-term goals,” Hirschfeld said, though she couldn’t speak to what factors tipped the scales for Davenport’s selection.

Carson Hollingsworth, president of the Student Government Association during the search, singled Davenport out from his first interaction with her.

“Dr. Davenport was unequivocally the best candidate we interviewed,” he wrote in a text message to USA TODAY NETWORK-Tennessee. “From the moment I met her, I thought she was the candidate that would create the most positive change for our University and would always support our students.”

Hollingsworth, now an alumnus, stressed that “there are too many incredible qualities to list that set Dr. Davenport apart and ahead of our other candidates.”

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University of Tennessee Chancellor Beverly Davenport speaks before the start of UT's Hike the Hill in Heels event on Monday, April 2, 2018.(Photo: Brianna Paciorka/News Sentinel )

Among them, he cited the wealth of experience she had, her genuine passion and care for her students and those she crossed paths with and said that “it was evident from the start that this was more than a job for her.”

Hollingsworth insisted that throughout Davenport’s time overseeing UT-Knoxville, she succeeded in catapulting positive change and supporting students.

Ownley saw the same track record of student engagement on the part of Davenport, noting she reached out to students to develop relationships with them.

“I think that’s one of the things that struck me more so than other chancellors that I’ve known,” Ownley said.

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UT Chancellor Beverly Davenport describes what shes most proud of from the past year
Brianna Paciorka/News Sentinel

The professor also thought Davenport had an edge in her experiences developing entrepreneurial relationships with private industries for the sake of students wanting to kickstart their own businesses.

“She had some experiences that were a little different from what you might normally see in a chancellor,” she said.